Here’s some more about your every­day, cheapo point-​and-​shoot cam­era, rather than expens­ive D-​SLRs: Macro shots.

With their short focal lenghts and their small sensors (and the res­ult­ing rather large depth-​of-​field, that is the “depth” of the in-​focus parts of the image) they’re really good for tak­ing close-​up shots. Most of those little bug­gers have a ded­ic­ated macro mode (have a look for a small flower-​symbol some­where on it) that allows you to get the cam­era really close to your sub­ject, so that you get a good mag­ni­fic­a­tion. While you can achieve sim­ilar effects with a ded­ic­ated macro lens on an SLR, they eas­ily costs 5 times as much as whole point-​and-​shoot cam­era, and you usu­ally have a hard time get­ting an extens­ive depth-​of-​field. In fact, most of the time you’ll find your­self stop­ping down to ƒ/​22 or less, and still not hav­ing enough depth-​of-​field. But then, stop­ping down the lens that much means that you also need loads of light to take the shot, and you will also get refrac­tion prob­lems from the small aper­ture… All in all, not nice.

The shot above shows the cap­pu­cino I just had a few minutes ago, snapped hand-​held on my office desk, with no spe­cial light­ing or any­thing. The cam­era: a 100 EUR (or less) Fuji­Film Z20.